Marriage

Exercising a police regulation over marriage, which it regards as a useful stabilizing influence, the secular arm of the law does little philosophizing as it goes about its business. Not so the ecclesiastical arm, whose stake is much greater. On marriage rests the prestige, the continuity of all world religions. Christianity, notably, is one religion whose priests and whose God set examples by standing in the role of parents to children. Great, therefore, is the chagrin of churchmen when they see the institution of marriage beset as it is in the U. S. Typically last week two men of God were working to do something about marriage.

P: In Chicago, George William Cardinal Mundelein directed his priests to give a course in marriage at low mass on Sundays during the ecclesiastical year which opened with the beginning of Advent last week. In a letter read from all Catholic pulpits Chicago's Archbishop said: "Marriage in olden days was a rather simple procedure. . . . How our present-day civilization and its laws have shattered these ideals! If any of you had dealt with this subject as long (15 years) and as intimately in thousands of individual cases, as patiently and sympathetically as I have tried to do, you would conclude, as I have, that not war, nor famine, nor pestilence have brought so much suffering and pain to the human race, as have hasty, ill-advised marriages, unions entered into without the knowledge, the preparation, the thought even an important commercial contract merits and receives. God made marriage an indissoluble contract, Christ made it a sacrament, the world today has made it a plaything of passion, an accompaniment of sex, a scrap of paper to be torn up at the whim of the participants."

From the 4th Sunday after Epiphany (Feb. 2) to the 25th Sunday after Pentecost (Nov. 22), Chicago Catholics will hear sermons on matters like the contract of matrimony, the arrangements and external solemnity of marriage, the canonical impediments thereto, mixed marriages, divorce, birth control, abortion, the conditions under which marriages may be valid or null & void. P: In St. Louis was published For Better,

Not For Worse, "a Manual of Christian Matrimony,''* by Rev. Dr. Walter Arthur Maier, famed Lutheran, editor of The Walther League Messenger, professor at Concordia Seminary. Chubby, dimple-chinned Dr. Maier, 42, is a harddriving, popular teacher, a hard-working editor who dictates daily to three secretaries. Frequently on the platform or before the microphone, he is proud to be called Bryanesque, speaks with a slight German accent, likes to tell how, as an undergraduate at Harvard, he won a $100 public speaking prize which he had to go to court to collect, because his scholarship stipulated he was to receive no other aid. A tome of 504 pages, For Better, Not For Worse surveys the whole of marriage and many another subject in the practiced manner of a platform denouncer. Dr. Maier quotes from such sources as Dancing Master William P. Rivers, Raymond Duncan, Proverbs, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, John Bunyan, Robert Briffault, Dora Russell, Mme Blavatsky, Mary Baker Eddy, Humbert Wolfe, Francis Bacon, Solomon, Dr. Johnson, Tolstoy, Cardinal Faulhaber, Kathleen Norris, Prince von Buelow, Martin Luther, Arthur Davison Ficke, Erdman Harris, The Spirit of Lord Northcliffe, Swedenborg, Joseph Choate and countless others--all out of one of the most remarkable memories and most capacious files in existence.

*Concordia Publishing House ($2).

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